‘Out of bed, but not yet abroad’: spatial experiences of recovery from illness in Early Modern England

In early modern England, patients tracked their transition from sickness to health according to where they were in domestic space. During severe illness, the sick were usually confined to bed, unable to stir; but as health returned, they gradually expanded their spatial horizons, until eventually they could leave the house – known as ‘going abroad’. Recovery was thus a state of spatial liminality – between the sickbed and the outdoors, or more specifically, the threshold of the front door. The present study asks what it was like to make this transition, exploring the patient’s physical, emotional, sensory and spiritual experience of the return to normal spatial life. Through these discussions, the chapter seeks to rebalance and brighten our overall picture of early modern health, which has hitherto focused mainly on disease and death. In so doing, it challenges the fairly widespread assumption that recovery was rare in this period

‘She sleeps well and eats an egg’: convalescent care in early modern England

Early modern diaries and letters are replete with complaints about the state of the body after illness. ‘A long sicknes…has much drained mee…and indeed…my feeble hands…can scarce write’, remarked Rev. Thomas Lowgh from Cumbria in 1654. A few years later, the London gentlewoman Ann Fanshawe recorded in her memoirs, ‘a very ill kind of fever…brought me so low that I was like an anatomy’. Serious physical illness thus left the body weak and lean, full of the ‘footsteps of disease’, to use the early modern term. It was not until full strength and flesh had returned that the patient was pronounced back to health. This chapter asks how doctors and laypeople measured the patient’s growing strength after illness, and analyses the physiological processes through which this restitution was thought to occur. It shows that both the measures, and the mechanisms, for the restoration of strength were intimately connected to the ‘six non-natural things’, excretion, sleep, food, passions, air, and exercise. Patients’ sleeping patterns, appetites for foods, and emotions, along with other inclinations and behaviours that related to the non-naturals, were used to track their progression on ‘the road to health’. Medical practitioners and the patient’s family sought to regulate each non-natural in order to promote the body’s restoration, and guard against possible relapse. I argue that this regulation, together with the assiduous monitoring of the patient’s growing strength, constitute a concept of convalescent care. Convalescence has rarely been addressed in the historiography of early modern medicine, perhaps because scholars have assumed that it was a later, Victorian invention. As this study shows, however, the concept has much older origins, rooted in ancient Hippocratic-Galenic medical traditions

'Nature Concocts & Expels': The Agents and Processes of Recovery from Disease in Early Modern England.

This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/03/26/shm.hkv022.short?rss=1.The 'golden saying' in early modern medicine was 'Nature is the healer of disease'. This article uncovers the meaning and significance of this forgotten axiom by investigating perceptions of the agents and physiological processes of recovery from illness in England, c.1580-1720. Drawing on sources such as medical texts and diaries, it shows that doctors and laypeople attributed recovery to three agents-God, Nature and the practitioner. While scholars are familiar with the roles of providence and medicine, the vital agency of Nature has been overlooked. In theory, the agents operated in a hierarchy: Nature was 'God's instrument', and the physician, 'Nature's servant'; but in practice the power balance was more ambivalent. Nature was depicted both as a housewife who cooked and cleaned the humours, and as a warrior who defeated the disease. Through exploring these complex dynamics, the article sheds fresh light on concepts of gender, disease and bodies.I would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for funding my postdoctoral project, ‘Miserie to Mirth: Recovery from Illness in Early Modern England’, upon which this article is based

Holy affections

This entry considers the early modern concept of the ‘holy affections’, a set of special spiritual emotions in Christian culture that were directed at God, and thought to be imbued with the Holy Spirit. Developed in the writings of the medieval theologians St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas, the holy affections included love for the Lord, praise and thankfulness, and the joyous anticipation of salvation. What was it like to experience these emotions? Why, when, and how were they expressed? Drawing on diaries and sermons from seventeenth-century England, I show that the holy affections were often found to be the most exquisite of all human feelings – they saturated the body and soul, filling it with ‘heart melting sweetness’. Exploring these delightful experiences helps rebalance our picture of the emotional landscape of early modern Christian culture, which has traditionally concentrated on the gloomier passions of guilt, grief, and fear

Chapter 5 ‘Rapt Up with Joy’:

This chapter takes advantage of recent insights from the history of emotions to offer a fresh perspective on children’s emotional responses to death. Drawing on a range of printed and archival sources, it argues that children expressed diverse and conflicting emotions, from fear and anxiety, to excitement and ecstasy. In contrast to Houlbrooke and Stannard, I have found that children’s responses seem to have changed little over the early modern period. This continuity is largely due to the endurance of the Christian doctrine of salvation, with its hauntingly divergent fates of heaven and hell

Chapter 4 'She sleeps well and eats an egg’: convalescent care in early modern England

"Very little is known about early modern approaches to convalescence and the author investigates the measures were taken by physicians and laypeople to restore health after illness. Drawing on medical texts, regimens, letters, and diaries, this chapter shows that the treatment of the convalescent differed both from the care of the sick and the healthy. It shows the vital place of the non-naturals in early modern medicine, and the role played by ‘Nature’, understood as the body’s principal agent and governor in physiological processes. The author finds that the 'six non-natural things' were on the one hand used as a way of gauging the extent of recovery, and on the other, were manipulated in a therapeutic role to ensure that both strength and flesh were restored. Thus, any remaining humours which might cause a relapse must be evacuated: good sleep, improved appetite and an ability to exercise were all signs of improvement but each, managed appropriately, also helped to restore strength, whilst negative emotions could endanger recovery and in its place cheerfulness –which was a restorative-must be encouraged.

Misery to Mirth

The history of early modern medicine often makes for depressing reading. It implies that people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died. This book seeks to rebalance and brighten our overall picture of early modern health by focusing on the neglected subject of recovery from illness in England, c.1580–1720. Drawing on an array of archival and printed materials, Misery to Mirth shows that recovery did exist conceptually at this time, and that it was a widely reported phenomenon. The book takes three main perspectives: the first is physiological or medical, asking what doctors and laypeople meant by recovery, and how they thought it occurred. This includes a discussion of convalescent care, a special branch of medicine designed to restore strength to the patient’s fragile body after illness. Secondly, the book adopts the viewpoint of patients themselves: it investigates how they reacted to the escape from death, the abatement of pain and suffering, and the return to normal life and work. At the heart of getting better was contrast—from ‘paine to ease, sadnesse to mirth, prison to liberty, and death to life’. The third perspective concerns the patient’s loved ones; it shows that family and friends usually shared the feelings of patients, undergoing a dramatic transformation from anguish to elation. This mirroring of experiences, known as ‘fellow-feeling’, reveals the depth of love between many individuals. Through these discussions, the book opens a window onto some of the most profound, as well as the more prosaic, aspects of early modern existence, from attitudes to life and death, to details of what convalescents ate for supper and wore in bed

Misery to mirth: recovery from illness in early modern England

The history of early modern medicine often makes for depressing reading. It implies that people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died. This book seeks to rebalance and brighten our overall picture of early modern health by focusing on the neglected subject of recovery from illness in England, c.1580-1720. Drawing on an array of archival and printed materials, Misery to Mirth shows that recovery did exist conceptually at this time, and that it was a widely reported phenomenon. The book takes three main perspectives: the first is physiological or medical, asking what doctors and laypeople meant by recovery, and how they thought it occurred. This includes a discussion of convalescent care, a special branch of medicine designed to restore strength to the patient’s fragile body after illness. Secondly, the book adopts the viewpoint of patients themselves: it investigates how they reacted to the escape from death, the abatement of pain and suffering, and the return to normal life and work. At the heart of getting better was contrast – from ‘paine to ease, sadnesse to mirth, prison to liberty, and death to life’. The third perspective concerns the patient’s loved ones; it shows that family and friends usually shared the feelings of patients, undergoing a dramatic transformation from anguish to elation. This mirroring of experiences, known as ‘fellow-feeling’, reveals the depth of love between many individuals. Through these discussions, the book opens a window on some of the most profound, as well as the more prosaic, aspects of early modern existence, from attitudes to life and death, to details of what convalescents ate for supper and wore in bed

Inside the sickchamber in early modern England: the experience of illness through six objects

This article transports the reader imaginatively into the early modern sickchamber, a space that has rarely attracted much historiographical attention. Focusing on England c.1600-1720, it attempts to reconstruct the patient’s sensory and emotional experiences of this environment. To do so, a material culture approach is adopted, which involves the analysis of six objects from the sickroom: a physic vessel, bedcurtains, clock, mattress, sheets, and blankets. The central argument is that sickness radically altered the way people related to the things around them. When seriously unwell, the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations of the items which during health gave rise to feelings of comfort, became sources of distress. Through this research, the article showcases the mutual benefits that an object-driven approach can bring to the twin fields of medical and material history. For the former, it sheds fresh light on the very meaning of disease in this period, showing that it was conceived as a form of dis-possession. A focus on objects also reveals a number of hitherto overlooked forms of suffering, such as ‘swallowing a lothsome potion’, tinnitus, and sleeplessness. For material studies, the article demonstrates the vital role of the senses in the ‘emotive agency’ of objects, as well as offering an opportunity to tackle the notorious challenge of the silence of many historical records on ‘everyday objects’. Confined to the sickchamber for a stretch of time, the attention of the sick rested on the things around them, eliciting comments which would have rarely been voiced in health

‘Rapt up with joy’: children’s emotional responses to death in early modern England

The chapter is an investigation of the child’s emotional response to death in early modern England. While much valuable scholarship has been produced on parents’ responses to the deaths of children, the reactions of the young themselves have rarely been explored. Drawing on a range of printed and archival sources, I argue that children expressed diverse and conflicting emotions, from fear and anxiety, to excitement and ecstasy. By exploring the emotional experiences of Protestants, the chapter contributes to the bourgeoning literature on emotion and religion, and contests earlier depictions of reformed Protestantism as an inherently intellectual, rather than an affective, faith. This study also suggests that we revise the way we classify the emotions, resisting the intuitive urge to categorise them as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. The fear of hell, for example, though profoundly unpleasant, was regarded as a rational, commendable response, which demonstrated the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul, and was a prerequisite for the attainment of a joyful assurance of heaven. An underlying question is to what extent children’s responses to death differed from those of adults. I propose that although their reactions were broadly similar, the precise preoccupations of dying children were different. Through highlighting these distinctive features, we can come to a closer idea of what it was like to be a child in the early modern period